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An Alaska man who brutally attacked three registered sex offenders — telling one he was an “avenging angel” — says his experience should serve as a deterrent to anyone considering vigilante justice. Jason Vukovich, 42, of Anchorage, is facing up to 25 years in prison after agreeing to plead guilty to first-degree attempted assault and a consolidated count of first-degree robbery in connection to the 2016 attacks. In exchange, prosecutors will drop more than a dozen charges, according to court records obtained by the Anchorage Daily News. In a five-page letter sent to the newspaper in November, Vukovich said he...

Then, in late 2016, Wikileaks published a number of Tom’s emails to John Podesta, which revealed the names of some of these sources. Among his advisors were two generals: one was a commander of the U.S. Air Force’s research laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and responsible for managing the Air Force’s $2.2 billion science and technology program; the other was the Special Assistant to the Commander of Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base. As devastating as this was to some, it established for those who doubted him that Tom was indeed telling the truth about his...

In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find. Which was how the Pentagon wanted it. For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze. The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down...

To paraphrase The Stranger, sometime the you eat the bear and sometimes the bear almost eats you . . . Bear Meets Match After Stalking Sitka Hunter For a few memorable moments, Ryan Wilson was both the hunter and the hunted. “I was hunting deer; (the bear) was hunting me,” he said, telling about his confrontation with a full-grown brown bear in the woods north of Sitka last month. Wilson had time for only one shot, but it was enough to stop the charging bear in its tracks. And what round did Mr. Wilson use to drop that bear...

A proposed gold and copper mine that nearly got buried by the Obama administration moved closer to reality when its developers filed new permits with the federal government. The company behind Pebble Mine, in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, were poised Friday to file a wetlands-fill permit with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The permit application by the Pebble Limited Partnership, a subsidiary of Northern Dynasty Minerals, marks a milestone for the project that has seen renewed interest since President Trump appointed former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. “At the outset of 2017, we established three ambitious...

During her nearly four years as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell said, oil companies did not pressure her about opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. Politicians, however, were a different story. Jewell says she heard about the issue repeatedly from Alaska’s governor and members of Congress, who were worried about a state budget crisis amid plummeting oil prices and declining local production. The state of Alaska, which lacks a sales tax and an income tax, relies on oil revenues to pay for the vast majority of its state budget, as well as fund...

An important provision of the tax cut legislation passed by Congress this week allows the American people to finally benefit from abundant petroleum resources that experts predict will be found in a very small area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on Alaska’s northern coast. The legislation directs the Interior Department to hold at least two lease sales over the next 10 years, for a maximum of 2,000 acres opened to drilling. Analysts say the sales could fetch as much as $2.2 billion. ANWR is enormous – 19 million acres, about the size of South Carolina. The 2,000 acres...

Link only (Bloomberg)

(CNN)A former Pentagon official who led a recently revealed government program to research potential UFOs said Monday evening that he believes there is evidence of alien life reaching Earth. "My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," Luis Elizondo said in an interview on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront." A pair of news reports in The New York Times and Politico over the weekend said the effort, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was begun largely at the behest of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who helped shore up funding for it...

And leaves academics stunned. "A study released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports found that snowfall on the highest peak in the Alaska Range has more than doubled since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century, which researchers attribute to climate change," Valerie Richardson reported in The Washington Times on December 19, 2017. "We were shocked when we first saw how much snowfall has increased," Erich Osterberg, an assistant professor of earth sciences who led the investigation with researchers from Dartmouth, the University of Maine and the University of New Hampshire, stated.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders joked Tuesday that some of the reporters in the White House briefing room are not from planet Earth. “I already want to pass on this question given you’ve got aliens sitting among you,” Sanders said after being asked about discontinued federal research into UFOs. Sanders said she was unaware of whether President Trump believes in UFOs or if he wants to restore funding for research. “I will check into that and be happy to circle back,” Sanders said.

Snowfalls atop an Alaskan mountain range have doubled since the start of the industrial age, evidence that climate change can trigger major increases in regional precipitation, according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports on Tuesday. The study by researchers from Dartmouth College, the University of Maine and the University of New Hampshire, shows modern snowfall levels in the Alaska Range at the highest in at least 1,200 years, averaging some 18 feet per year from around 8 feet per year from 1600-1840. [Snip] The research was based on an analysis of two ice core samples collected at 13,000...

PARIS - Snowfall in central Alaska has more than doubled since the mid 1800s, said a study on Tuesday, pointing a finger at global warming. Two ice cores drilled into Mount Hunter in the Denali National Park revealed a 117 per cent increase in wintertime snowfall in south-central Alaska since about 1840, researchers wrote in the journal Scientific Reports. Summer snow also increased, by nearly 50 per cent. "We were shocked when we first saw how much snowfall has increased," said the study's co-author Erich Osterberg of Dartmouth College. "We had to check and double-check our results to make sure...

Pentagon secretly set up program to investigate UFOs at Harry Reid's urging, reports say The Defense Department secretly set up a program ten years ago to investigate unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, at the urging of then-Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, according to new reports. The Defense Department secretly set up a program ten years ago to investigate unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, at the urging of then-Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, according to new reports. Both The New York Times and the website Politico published stories Saturday revealing the existence of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat...

The New York Times reports that the Department of Defense spent $22 million on a mysterious project known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The main purpose of this program was to research unidentified flying objects (U.F.O.) and their interaction with planet earth. This program, while not completely hidden from the public, was very difficult to find in the $600 billion D.O.D. budget. In fact, the D.O.D. had never acknowledged the existence of this project until now. The government claims to have stopped funding it in 2012. But that does not necessarily mean the program stopped all together, according to...

Former Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) wants to protect the United States from . . . wait for it. . . aliens from outer space. Both the New York Times and Politico just revealed on Saturday that Reid launched a program in 2007 to investigate Unidentified Flying Objects. You know, UFOs. Or Little Green Men, or ‘Greys,’ or whatever. Called the “Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program,” it wasn’t an official secret, yet only a few people knew about it. These included Reid and the late Senators Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Ted Stevens (R-AK). So what did they investigate? Supposedly stuff like...

Connecticut has the most underfunded pension system in the nation, amassing more than $127.7 billion in liabilities.. The study entitled Unaccountable and Unaffordable showed Connecticut’s pension system dropping below Illinois and Kentucky when its pension liabilities were calculated with a “risk-free” discount rate equal to the rate of a U.S. Treasury bond. Connecticut’s unfunded pension liability rose from $99.2 billion in ALEC’s 2016 study to $127.7 billion in 2017, leaving the pension system only 19 percent funded. The debt from the public pensions amounts to $35,721 per person in Connecticut, the second highest per capita debt in the nation behind...

"Gunman who took hostages at Louisiana bank posted chilling Facebook messages" SNIPPET: "The gunman who took three hostages at a Louisiana bank Tuesday -- killing one of them before being shot and killed by police -- recently posted chilling messages on Facebook, including a cartoon strip about hostages.   In a post on Sunday, 20-year-old Fuaed Abdo Ahmed displays a cartoon strip that focuses on an apparent hostage situation." SNIPPET: "Ahmed's final post, made Tuesday just hours before the hostage standoff began, is of a photo of a man with a sword attacking a tank.Under the photo is a quote...

Alabama is allowed to destroy digital voting records created at the polls during today's U.S. Senate election after all. At 1:36 p.m. Monday, a Montgomery County Circuit Court judge issued an order directing Alabama election officials to preserve all digital ballot images created at polling places across the state today. But at 4:32 p.m. Monday, attorneys for Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill and Ed Packard, the state administrator of elections, filed an "emergency motion to stay" that order, which the state Supreme Court granted minutes after Merrill and Packard's motion was filed. By granting the stay, the court effectively...